Loved and loathed…
Roger Ailes transformed the US media landscape, writes Bill Trott
ROGER Ailes, who became one of the most powerful figures in US politics and media by turning the Fox News network into a booming voice for conservatives before he was brought down by sexual harassment charges has died at the age of 77.
Ailes worked as a media strategist for Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush before launching Fox News in 1996.
His wife, Elizabeth, said he was a patriot who was profoundly grateful for the opportunities his country gave him.
As founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Fox News, Ailes became one of the most influential figures in the Republican Party, and the network was integral to US President Donald Trump’s successful run for the White House last year.
From the start, Ailes had a clear conservative vision of what he wanted Fox to be as he took the network to the top of the cable news ratings and made it a major profit centre for Rupert Murdoch’s TwentyFirst Century Fox Inc media empire.
But accusations of Ailes’s treatment of women would be his downfall.
In July last year, Gretchen Carlson, a former Miss America who appeared on the popular Fox and Friends morning programme before being given her own show, sued him.
She said he had made sexual advances toward her and then hurt her career in retaliation after she rejected him.
Two weeks later, Ailes was ousted from the network with a $40 million (R530m) severance package. His departure came during the Republican National Convention and at a time when the network was scoring record ratings.
Soon after, he began advising the Trump campaign.
Star cable host Bill O’Reilly himself left the network after he was accused of sexual harassment.
Ailes had run Fox News under the slogan “fair and balanced”, and conservatives found it a much-needed antidote to the perceived liberal slant of traditional media. Critics denounced it as a cynical and polarising right-wing propaganda machine.
“He helped market a brand of pseudo-journalism that revolves basically around hate, rhetoric, divisiveness, pitting people against each other,” Eric Boehlert, senior fellow at liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America, said. “That seeps into the culture and into politics.”
The story of Fox News was the story of Ailes. His conservative red-white-and-blue beliefs set the narrative for the network’s stories, and critics said it was difficult to determine where Ailes’s agenda ended and Republican Party talking points began. No potential Republican presidential candidate stood much of a chance without Ailes’s blessing.
“I want to elect the next president,” he told Fox executives at a 2010 meeting, according to the 2014 biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman.
“Ailes’s power and ruthlessness… allowed him to take over the Republican Party and mould it to fit his paranoid world view,” Sherman said last year.
In addition to its king-making power, Ailes wanted the Fox News network to be entertaining and have sex appeal.
“From the very beginning, Roger wanted attractive women, translucent desks,” a former staffer said.
“‘I want to see her legs’,” the source quoted Ailes as saying of an anchorwoman. “‘I want the viewers to see their legs. I want people to watch Fox News even if the sound is turned down’.”
Ailes built a reputation as intimidating, profane, egotistical, according to reports. Sherman reported that Ailes spent millions of the network’s dollars to hire private investigators to follow unfriendly journalists, including him.
After Carlson’s lawsuit, other female employees, including Fox star Megyn Kelly, came forward to accuse Ailes of making inappropriate jokes, ogling them, commenting on their bodies, groping, kissing and propositioning them for sex in return for career advancement.
“It became common knowledge that women did not want to be alone with him,” the former Fox staffer said.
“They would bring other men with them when they had to meet him. It became a locker room, towel-snapping environment.”
A second suit was filed in August last year by Andrea Tantaros, another former Fox anchor who claimed that Ailes, who was married to former television executive Elizabeth Tilson, had also harassed her.
Behind the scenes, according to the lawsuit, Fox News was “a sex-fuelled, Playboy Mansion-like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency and misogyny”.
Ailes teamed up with Murdoch to put Fox News on the air on October 7, 1996, and it gained traction in 1998 with coverage of then president Bill Clinton’s sex scandal involving White House intern Monica Lewinsky. By 2002, Fox had overtaken long-established CNN in the ratings.
As the network lashed Clinton and later president Barack Obama, flame-throwing commentators such as O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity became household names. And when Republican politicians such as Newt Gingrich, John Kasich, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin were not in office, Ailes put them on the air as pundits.
O’Reilly left Fox News in April after his own sexual harassment scandal that had led to more than 50 advertisers pulling commercials from his programme, The O’Reilly Factor.
Ailes was born in Warren, Ohio, on May 15, 1940. One of his first jobs after leaving Ohio University was a low-level position on The Mike Douglas Show, a variety and talk show.
He quickly worked his way up to executive producer, and in 1967 had a life-changing conversation with Nixon, one of the show’s guests, and convinced the future president of the importance of television.
Nixon hired the 28-year-old Ailes to serve as executive producer for television on his successful presidential campaign a year later.
Ailes was credited with crafting television events that let the candidate take his message directly to the public, rather than go through other media.
Ailes’s role was chronicled in the best-selling book, The